Why is this important?

An awareness of
SNOMED CT features,
components, characteristics and products provides an initial foundation on which to build greater
understanding. It also informs discussions leading to decisions about adoption, implementation
and use of this terminology.

When implemented in software applications,
SNOMED CTcan be used to represent clinically relevant information consistently, reliably and
comprehensively as an integral part of producing electronic health information.

Exploring SNOMED CT

While reading the guide, you may find it useful to explore the content of
SNOMED CT. You can do this using one of a range of online
browserslisted on our web site at http://snomed.org/browsers. Note that the listed
browsers are not endorsed by
SNOMED International and they should only be used to a get feel for the content and structure of the terminology.
It is useful to experiment with several different
browsers as they vary in the way they present particular features of the terminology.

SNOMED CT Design and Development

SNOMED CT Components

SNOMED CT is a core clinical healthcare terminology that contains
conceptswith unique meanings and formal logic based definitions organized into
hierarchies.
SNOMED CT content is represented using three types of
components:

Concepts representing clinical meanings that are organized into hierarchies.

These
components are supplemented by
reference sets, which provide additional flexible features and enable configuration of the terminology
to address different requirements.

Concepts

SNOMED CT conceptsrepresent clinical thoughts, ranging from |abscess| to |zygote|. Every
concept has a unique numeric
concept identifier. Within each
hierarchy,conceptsare organized from the general to the more detailed. This allows detailed clinical
data to be recorded and later accessed or aggregated at a more general level.

SNOMED CT Hierarchies

Examples of some of the hierarchies include |clinical finding|, |procedure|, |observable entity|, |body structure| and |organism|.

SNOMED CT Characteristics - Comprehensive, Scalable and Flexible

SNOMED CThas a broad coverage of health related topics. It can be used to describe a patient's
medical history, the details of an orthopedic procedure, the spread of epidemics,
and much more. At the same time, the terminology has an unmatched depth, which enables
clinicians to record data at the appropriate level of granularity.

Specific applications tend to focus on a restricted set of
SNOMED CT, such as
concepts related to ophthalmology. These
subsets can be used to present relevant parts of the terminology, depending on the clinical
context and local requirements. This means for example, that a drop down list to select
diagnoses in an
electronic health record in a mental health facility can be tailored to that setting. Similarly,
subsets can be defined for problem lists for physician specialties or to provide appropriate
medication lists for nurses in community care.

When individual jurisdictions have needs beyond those that can be reflected in a
global terminology, perhaps due to requirements in local legislation, they can develop
local or national
extensions. Thus, even though
SNOMED CT is global in scope, it can be adapted to each country's or areas requirements.
SNOMED CT maps work to provide explicit links to health related classifications and coding
schemes in use around the world, e.g.
statistical classifications such as
ICD-9-CM,ICD-10, and
ICD-O3. Maps to or from several national code systems are also available from, or under
development, by
Members. Maps to or from clinical domain specific code systems are also maintained by specialty
groups with which
SNOMED International has collaborative agreement. Maps facilitate reuse of
SNOMED CT based clinical data for other purposes, such as reimbursement or statistical reporting.